In his campaign speeches, Kennedy holds up higher education as the life boat to help rescue people from an island of poverty. But while he was Chairman of the Board at the University of Illinois, he repeatedly increased the cost of tuition while African American student enrollment suffered.

“When you have a 27 percent increase of tuition between 2009-2014 for in-state residents, you are talking about at least $2,500 extra in money,” said Gus Wood, an African American Studies Ph.D. student at the Urbana-Champaign campus. “I tie the rising of tuition directly to the pricing out and the lack of African-American people on the campus,” Wood said.

[Evan F. Moore, an adjunct journalism professor for Chicago’s DePaul University who has written extensively on education, violence and Chicago culture] said, “When the school raises tuition, that pushes out students, especially poor students. There is definitely a correlation there.”

The year before Kennedy became board chairman, African American enrollment was at 2,596 students, which made up 6.44 percent of the total student population according to data compiled by the Division of Management Information. The university raised tuition by 9.5 percent in 2010, 6.9 percent in 2011, 4.8 percent in 2012 and 1.7 percent in 2013.

In 2009, African American enrollment slipped slightly down to 2,572 students before a significant dropoff down to 2,276 in 2010. Black student enrollment eroded each consecutive year Kennedy was in charge for a total decline of nearly 15 percent until the admissions office reported a slight uptick in 2015, his final year on the board.

Kennedy denied there was a correlation between rising cost of tuition and the broadening diversity gap on campus during an interview with WCIA on Monday morning.

“No, I don’t think that is what occurred,” Kennedy said, suggesting the problems were already set in motion before he took the job. “I think the major decline in African American enrollment at the University of Illinois occurred between 2009 and 2010 before anything the new board did could have possibly affected those outcomes.

University BOT’s don’t determine what the tuition rates need to be. That is the done by the university administration in conjunction with financial officers. The university administration presents budget and tuition proposals to the board. The board then votes. In most cases, the boards approve the recommendations of the administration.

To imply Kennedy recommended tuition increases is off base. Also, the states decline in funding to public universities began in 2005. Most if not all the publics were forced to raise tuition to make up for the decrease in state funding.

—-Kennedy denied there was a correlation between rising cost of tuition and the broadening diversity gap on campus during an interview with WCIA on Monday morning.

Even with scholarships and discounting this is unlikely true because first generation students are especially sensitive to price since they often have less information about how college pricing works (African-Americans are more likely to be first gen).

This identifies the problem with Kennedy’s candidacy pretty well. It’s fair to say the problems were set in motion before him, but he doesn’t highlight what he and the board did to address those issues once he was in place.

Kennedy had a cavalier attitude about money and academic freedom while he was on the BOT at UIUC. From the Salaita case coverage in e Chicago Tribune:

As a final irony, consider that the chairman of the trustees, Christopher Kennedy, is the son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. His approach to the Salaita controversy is to see it as a matter that can be papered over with a financial settlement: “We want to be fair, but we don’t want to be pushovers,” Kennedy told the Chicago Tribune. “Either they will sue or we will settle.” That’s what happens when questions of academic principle get reduced to dollars and cents–the university comes to believe it can trample any principle, as long as there’s money to make it go away.

The cost of going to school in ChamBana is high, (tuition and rent) the town campus get a B grade at best. Unless you want to be an engineer or a agribusiness person there are better / cheaper options. Socially the high profile sports teams are abysmal not a lot of HS freshman (when they start looking at college) going “all in” for the Illini these days. For those inclined the UoI Greek system seems to still be going strong.

Rich…He was a very bad choice to be on the board. No conection to the UofI and a typical east coast private school attitude. Just another lame app by Gov Pat. No feel for the place just politics for the Dems.

==“No, I don’t think that is what occurred,” Kennedy said, suggesting the problems were already set in motion before he took the job. “I think the major decline in African American enrollment at the University of Illinois occurred between 2009 and 2010 before anything the new board did could have possibly affected those outcomes.==

That doesn’t seem completely consistent with Maxwell’s numbers, nor does it wash that a tuition increase wouldn’t affect enrollment.

—-Despite my lack of overall trust for university BOT, I see No racist policies here.

I don’t think anyone set out policies to purposefully harm African-American students, but the question is did Kennedy take into account how policies affected an underrepresented population. What did he do to minimize the impact of policies that likely disproportionately affect that population?

He was the Chair and he wants to be Governor. He should be thinking about these things.

The conflation of top foreign students being accepted in record numbers to the prestigious academic programs at the U of I (bringing their coveted high tuition payments with them) with the lessening of qualified Illinois students and not just AA students (many of whom attend on scholarships/grants/reduced tuition) must not be overlooked or ignored. I don’t know that this economic transfer was orchestrated or exacerbated by Kennedy’s BOT, but it is a fact that it’s been going on for a while– ostensibly while helping improve the university’s financials. Many of us alums have raised issues with this for good reason, but calling it “racist” seems like a stretch.